And in Scrooge, I always felt bad for Ebeneezer. The welfare bums wanted a piece of him, but Scrooge was a total badass. He had good traits. He was frugal, hard working and innovative. Its too bad he softened up in that classic. The lefties and the ghosts denutted him and made him their little state bitch, a slave of the poor, guilting the poor bastard to death of his estate. The writer/director had everything upside down in that movie. The lazy asses converted Scrooge. Why couldn't Scrooge have influenced the lazy asses?

Mainstream conservative position, really. We know that poor people are lazy, because if they weren't then they wouldn't be poor. Any evidence to the contrary (long hours of hard work in Scrooge's office, long hours in the factory with no paid overtime, etc., etc.) is clearly a socialist conspiracy planted to rile up the lazy poor.

In Scrooge's time the industrial revolution and the development of the steam engine had wiped out millions of jobs. People who had worked hard all their lives suddenly found they could no longer work because they had been replaced by a machine. The average person in English non-agricultural jobs worked a ten hour day, with a half day off Saturday and a whole day off on Sunday (= about 60 hours/week), so they probably were a lot less of a "lazy ass" than you.

I always felt bad for Scrooge. Abusive father, dead sister, rough childhood, causing him to be so withdrawn that he ruined his first chance at love, which in turn made him more bitter. His life put him on a path that he was too afraid to leave, resulting in a lonely, miserable old man who clung desperately to his money because it was a substitute for happiness.

There's also the possible interpretation that Scrooge was Jewish, being forced into this. He followed some common stereotypes, and Dickens was relatively insensitive about Jewish stereotypes until they were pointed out to him.

@GigaGuess: The typical response to that is that if that's what the market will bear, then Crachit should have reduced his cost of living to match. Or that if the wages were really that abhorrent, the only answer would be to leave immediately and watch your former employer fail in your absence, even though there may be circumstances that make leaving difficult. (The one constant example in all the adaptations is actually internal - Crachit's respect towards and personal sense of duty to Scrooge.)

... damn. I'll be right back, I'm going to check out a copy of the original and some DVDs of the plays from the library.

You know Dickens made it up but based it on his own experiences during the 1800's in London's gutters, right? And that England in the 1800's is the closest any country has ever come to true capitalism, resulting in extreme poverty among the majority of its population?

Y'know, with the threats of a full-blown communist revolution until the government stepped in and created labour laws (including legalizing unions so that factory owners couldn't exploit the shit out of their workers).